Programming Protocol-Independent Packet Processors High-Level Programming (P4HLP): Towards Unified High-Level Programming for a Commodity Programmable Switch

Abstract

Network algorithms are building blocks of network applications. They are inspired by emerging commodity programmable switches and the Programming Protocol-Independent Packet Processors (P4) language. P4 aims to provide target-independent programming neglecting the architecture of underlying infrastructure. However, commodity programmable switches have tight programming restrictions due to limited resources and latency. In addition, manufacturers tailor P4 according to their architecture, putting more restrictions on it. These intrinsic and extrinsic restrictions dilute the goal of P4. This paper proposes P4 high-level programming (P4HLP) framework, a suite of toolchains that simplifies P4 programming. The paper highlights three aspects: (i) E-Domino, a high-level programming language that defines both stateless and stateful processing of data plane in C-style codes; (ii) P4HLPc, a compiler that automatically generates P4 programs from E-Domino programs, which removes the barrier between high-level programming and low-level P4 primitives; (iii) modular programming that organizes programs into reusable modules, to enable fast reconfiguration of commodity switches. Results show that P4HLPc is efficient and robust, thus is suitable for data plane high-level programming. Compared with P4, E-Domino saves at least 5.5× codes to express the data plane algorithm. P4HLPc is robust to policy change and topology change. The generated P4 programs achieve line-rate processing.